With characteristics of ease of use and low costs, an Ethernet (Ethernet) technology has become one of the most important technologies in an entire communications network. With the continuous development of a telecommunications network, the Ethernet technology has been applied to an enterprise network, a metropolitan area network, and a wide area network on a large scale. A traditional management and maintenance means of the Ethernet technology is extremely limited, and a carrier-class operation means is even unavailable. As a result, an operator can only depend on a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP for short) to manage an Ethernet network. The number of Ethernet devices managed in this manner is limited and a large number of Internet Protocols (IP for short) are required. It is increasingly evident that the operator increases costs in deployment, management, and maintenance of the Ethernet are becoming. Therefore, it is imperative to fill in gaps of an Ethernet Operation, Administration and Maintenance (OAM for short) protocol.
The operation, management and maintenance of the Ethernet is referred to as Ethernet OAM, and a related protocol standard is IEEE 802.1ag. The IEEE 802.1ag protocol is a Connectivity Fault Management protocol and also referred to as the Connectivity Fault Management (CFM for short) protocol. The protocol has capabilities of end-to-end fault detection, fault verification, and fault location at a service level and a network level.
Existing maintenance end point (MEP for short) configuration is manual configuration, and therefore the existing MEP configuration is relatively complex, which increases difficulty in extensive popularization of practical application of CFM.